Leonard Cohen – “This Isn’t China” (2002)
Hold me close
and tell me what the world is like
I don’t want to look outside
I want to depend on your eyes
and your lips
I don’t want to feel anything
but your hand
on the old raw bumper
I don’t want to feel anything else
If you love the dead rocks
and the huge rough pine trees
Ok I like them too
Tell me if the wind
makes a pretty sound
in the billion billion needles
I’ll close my eyes and smile
Tell me if it’s a good morning
or a clear morning
Tell me what the fuck kind of morning
it is
and I’ll buy it
And get the dog
to stop whining and barking
This isn’t China
nobody’s going to eat it
It’s just going to get fed and petted
Ok where were we?
Ok go if you must.
I’ll create the cosmos
by myself
I’ll let it all stick to me
every fucking pine needle
And I’ll broadcast my affection
from this shaven dome
360 degrees
to all the dramatic vistas
to all the mists and snows
that moves across
the shining mountains
to the women bathing
in the stream
and combing their hair
on the roofs
to the voiceless ones
who have petitioned me
from their surprising silence
to the poor in the heart
(oh more and more to them)
to all the thought-forms
and leaking mental objects
that you get up here
at the end of your ghostly life
Stephen Holden – “Ingmar Bergman: In Art’s Old Sanctuary, a High Priest of Film” (2007)
Written by Stephen Holden for the New York Times, comes this rumination on the films and career of the late, famed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman…
Certain screen images, no matter how often they are parodied, resist the demolition of ridicule. Take the image of a knight playing chess with Death in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 allegory, The Seventh Seal, set in a medieval world reeling from the plague. This will always be Mr. Bergman’s defining signature: a joke perhaps, but also not a joke.
If you revisit The Seventh Seal with a smirk on your face, you will likely be struck anew by the power of this life-and-death chess match and the scary ashen face of a black-robed Death. What may seem the essence of portentous symbolism when taken out of context retains its primal force within the film. You are inescapably reminded that in the metaphysical and emotional struggles portrayed in Bergman’s films, the stakes are all or nothing and extremely personal.
“Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven’t thought about death,” Bergman mused in Bergman Island, a recent, extraordinarily intimate documentary portrait, filmed on the island of Faro, where he lived in semi-isolation for four decades. The image of a chess game, he said, was inspired by a painting in a church he visited as a boy with his father. Until many decades later, when he underwent anesthesia that left him unconscious for several hours, he harbored “an insane fear” of death. Losing, then regaining, consciousness partially alleviated that fear, which seeps into the core of many of his finest films.
Mr. Bergman’s ruthlessly honest investigation of his demons is what lends such images their crushing weight. However fictional, they are undeniably truthful expressions of one artist’s personal torment, redeemed by fleeting glimpses of eternity and redemption in a long, dark night of the soul.
Intimations of divinity, he says in the documentary, can be found in classical music, in which he finds “human holiness.” And his use of classical music, especially in what to me is his greatest film, Persona, adds an incalculable profundity to his work.
Even Bergman’s comedies have a powerful undertow of sadness, of time rushing by and of dark shadows gathering. Geography has a lot to do with it. The chilly winter light of his films, most of them exquisitely shot by Sven Nykvist, emanates from a sun low on the horizon. Looking for the sun is tantamount to searching for God.
In Mr. Bergman’s films, the figure of his own father, a stern Lutheran preacher and fearsome disciplinarian, is almost indistinguishable from the recurrent image of a remote and punishing God. In the autobiographical Fanny and Alexander, the 10-year-old hero’s terrifying stepfather is the kind of authoritarian figure who could haunt your nightmares for a lifetime. Most recently, that vengeful patriarch appears in Saraband, Mr. Bergman’s bleak and brilliant 2003 epilogue to Scenes from a Marriage, his 1973 masterpiece.
An existential dread runs through the entire Bergman oeuvre. Among the major directors who spearheaded the international art film movement after 1950, he was the one most closely in touch with the intellectual currents of the day. Freud and Sartre were riding high, and Time magazine wondered in a cover story if God were dead. Attendance at Mr. Bergman’s films was a lot like going to church. Though many of those films are steeped in church imagery, God is usually absent from the sanctuary.
As a college student and avid art-film goer in the early 1960s, I was overwhelmed by Mr. Bergman’s films, with their heavy-duty metaphysical speculation and intellectual seriousness. In those days, you would no more argue with Mr. Bergman’s stature than you would question the greatness of the modern Western literary canon; like Mann, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, et al., Mr. Bergman was an intellectual god whose work could reward a lifetime of analytical study.
Today the religion of high art that dominated the 1950s and ’60s seems increasingly quaint and provincial. The longstanding belief that humans are born with singular psyches and souls is being superseded by an emerging new ideal: the human as technologically perfectible machine. The culture of the soul — of Freud and Marx and, yes, Bergman — has been overtaken by the culture of the body. Biotechnology leads the shaky way into the future, and pseudo-immortality, through cloning, is in sight. Who needs a soul if the self is technologically mutable? For that matter, who needs art?
That may be why Bergman’s spiritual malaise seems less relevant than his flesh-and-blood experience. No filmmaker has explored relationships between men and women with such depth and passion. His achievement is inseparable from that of the extraordinary actresses — like Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and, most of all, Liv Ullmann (with whom he made 10 films) — who people his work and who embody both the women in his life and his own feminine side.
Whereas the majority of men in Mr. Bergman’s films are selfish, grown-up little boys, at once grandiose, lecherous, feckless and narcissistic, the women whom they love and betray are their connection to what really matters in everyday life.
“I usually say I left puberty at 58,” he jokes in the documentary. From the evidence of his life — five marriages and many affairs — the men in his movies are unvarnished reflections of himself.
In Saraband, Ms. Ullmann’s character, Marianne, visits her former husband, Johan (Erland Josephson), 30 years after Scenes from a Marriage. As much as she remembers their furious strife, she is able to forgive. Through all the darkness of Mr. Bergman’s films, the humanity glows.
Stephen Holden
Colin Escott – “Hi Records: That Memphis Beat” (1991)
This article from the July 1991 issue of Record Hunter, comes from roots music historian Colin Escott, about famed soul music label Hi Records, home of Al Green and Ann Peebles back in the 70s…
Long in the shadow of Sun and Stax, Memphis based Hi Records finally hit the big time with Al Green and set the ’70s soul trend before fading into obscurity. Colin Escott gets the Hi lowdown.
The Tennessee city of Memphis has produced three record companies whose reputations have endured: Sun, Stax and Hi. Not bad considering that most other cities of comparable size have produced none.
Of those three, Hi seemed the most likely to become an also-ran, but then – a decade after it was launched – it suddenly took on a new lease of life with the arrival of Al Green. Now not even a cursory history of black music can be written without a reference to Hi Records.
Hi was founded with an investment of $3.50 from Ray Harris. As a rockabilly singer, Harris had cut two luminous but wholly unsuccessful records for Sun in 1956 and 1957. Working in construction to keep himself going, he met Jerry Lee Lewis’s cousin, Carl McVoy, who greatly impressed him with a rockabilly version of ‘You Are My Sunshine’. They went to a home studio, paid $3.50 and emerged with a rough demo.
Harris had two partners in the project, Bill Cantrell and Quinton Claunch, who had worked on country music production for Sun in the mid ’50s. Rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous at Sun had done little for their fortunes, so Harris, Cantrell and Claunch approached Joe Cuoghi, who owned Poplar Tunes record store and operated a local distributorship. Cuoghi had the financing and industry contacts that the others lacked, and, with Cuoghi’s bankroll, Harris went to Nashville and re-cut ‘You Are My Sunshine’, which Hi Records launched in late 1957.
By early 1958 the record was getting some action but Cuoghi could not collect from the distributors in time to pay for more pressings so the partners were forced to sell their burgeoning hit to Sun Records. They used Sun’s money to lease an abandoned cinema on South Lauderdale Street, and buy some primitive recording equipment.
It would be over a year before they tasted anything close to another hit; in fact, Cuoghi was on the point of closing the company when they finally hit paydirt with the Bill Black Combo.
Black had been dismissed from Elvis Presley’s employ, and was watching the repo man walk away with his household appliances when he and Ray Harris stumbled upon the unique bottom-heavy dance beat that became a trademark for both Black and his saxophonist, Ace Cannon. During the late ’50s and early ’60s, Hi became indelibly associated with greasy, blues-based instrumentals to the point where Hi was assumed to be an acronym for ‘Hit Instrumentals’.
Both Black and Cannon sold exceptionally well in the R&B market – so well, in fact, that Hi wouldn’t place Black’s photo on albums so as to foster the illusion that he might indeed be black. The amiable bassist died in 1965, although it remained business as usual for the Combo. By that point, Black had already quit touring and had franchised his name, putting several ‘Bill Black Combos’ on the road.
It was the British invasion that spelled the end of the first era at Hi Records. Their most consistent seller became black bandleader Willie Mitchell, though it’s still unclear how Mitchell actually came to join Hi. Ray Harris recalled that Mitchell was working for an automobile upholstery company and they started talking music while Mitchell was refurbishing Harris’ Cadillac. Mitchell recalled that his pianist, Joe Hall, had played on the first Black sessions and that Hall had given Mitchell his ticket into Hi. Wherever the truth lies, Mitchell became a recording artist in 1961, and subsequently the house arranger. His road band became the studio rhythm section.
By the late ’60s, Memphis was once again a hive of activity, largely focusing on Stax. In conjunction, Hi did good spin-off business as a custom studio for the singers arriving by the planeload for soul transplants, but they couldn’t come up with anyone on their own label who could challenge the Stax artists.
At the close of the decade, Mitchell had almost quit touring after a bad road accident, and he started bringing in more of his own signings, including Ann Peebles and Al Green. He had met Green in Midland, Texas, and invited him to check out the musical climate in Memphis. Green had already scored a hit with ‘Back Up Train’, but was staring oblivion in the face when he met Mitchell.
When Green broke through with ‘Tired of Being Alone’ in 1971, the original Hi partnership had been completely re-cast. Quinton Claunch had left in 1960, and later co-founded Goldwax Records. In early 1970, Harris quit the company, venturing the suggestion that Green would go nowhere “singing in that cissy voice”. A few weeks later, in July 1970, Joe Cuoghi died.
At the same time Carl McVoy, who had bought out Claunch’s share of the company, was going through a messy divorce (as one might expect from a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis) and sold out. Mitchell bought part of Harris’ and McVoy’s shares and became the executive vice president, while Cuoghi’s lawyer Nick Pesce, who had been a silent partner from the beginning, became president.
Al Green had arrived in late 1968, and Mitchell kept the faith through two largely desolate years. During that time, Green found his true voice and Mitchell refined his production values. Hi had bought an old eight-track recorder (pieced together from two Ampex four-track machines), which operated on ‘tube’ technology. The warm sound colouration, dubbed the ‘tube sound’, was integral to Mitchell’s productions, as was the snare drum, tuned and mixed in such a way that its crisp, dry snap became the centrepiece of the backing tracks. Willie’s rhythm section played with deceptive minimalism, giving him a sparse – but elegant – backing track. Then the vocals were couched in horn and string arrangements, giving the final production a sophistication that Mitchell had always cherished. After years spent working in the giant shadow cast by Stax, he had emerged with something truly unique. More than that, his productions held out the potential for crossover into the pop market, which made the difference between sales in the thousands and sales in the millions.
After Al Green broke through Mitchell tried the same formula with other singers but could never find a consistent winning pattern. He came closest with Ann Peebles, who had come to Memphis from the family choir in St Louis. Standing barefoot on the tattered carpet in the old studio, she turned in many stellar performances including ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’ and ‘I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down’, but she could never quite break through into the major league.
Syl Johnson, Otis Clay, O.V. Wright and others made some fine music with Willie Mitchell, but there was no doubt that Al Green paid the rent – and he became a trouble man. He found material comforts less rewarding than he’d imagined when he had none and started a chain of events which would see him found his own church and retire from the worldly music scene in search of a little peace of mind. The catalyst for this change of heart was a plate of scalding grits doused over him by a jilted girlfriend one morning.
Shortly before Green’s ‘retirement’, Atlantic Records reportedly offered nine million dollars for Hi. By this point, only Bill Cantrell and Nick Pesce remained form the original partnership which launched the label two decades earlier. Both were in favour of selling, although Mitchell held the view that if Atlantic were offering $9 million one year, they would offer $18 million the next. His optimism proved to be unfounded, and Hi was eventually sold in 1976 for considerably less than $9 million to Cream Records, a corporation that had been founded by Al Bennett, previously president of Liberty Records.
Bennett planned to make Hi a continuing force in the marketplace, but his plans were pre-empted by the disco explosion, a sharp downturn in the record business and the fact that Al Green’s popularity could not survive his return to the church. Shortly after Bennett died in 1989, the company’s operations moved to a squalid little cubbyhole in a Hollywood office block, and were subsequently put up for sale.
For two decades, though, Hi made some of the most enduring music of the times. They embraced a multitude of styles, starting with rockabilly, moving into instrumentals and Stax-slanted R&B, and closing with sophisticated soul music. It was a long journey in search of the big payday, but they made the most of being the right place at the right time. Hi had started by following trends and finished by setting them. Only a select few can say as much.
Colin Escott
“The Sad State of Music Journalism”
I read a review of Prince’s new album Lotusflow3r today (I won’t mention the magazine or the reviewer), but it really upset me. Not because this person disliked the album, but because he reviewed it after admittedly listening to the album exactly once. That’s it. Now, how can any respected music critic write a review telling you that an album is bad (or good, even) after just one listen? I think this is irresponsible, lazy journalism and it seems to be a common practice these days. I am not going to trust any person’s opinion about an album if they have not listened to it at least three or four times. What about if they completely change their mind about the album by the third listen? Are they going to write another review letting you know they were wrong? Or are they going to allow people to continue to be influenced by that original review that they no longer stand by?
There are many artists, including Prince, U2, R.E.M., Neil Young (etc) whose albums I have to listen to several times before I can give an honest opinion about them. They don’t reveal their strengths and weaknesses so quickly and easily. Sometimes I dislike them off of one listen, but then by the third or fourth listen, I start to change my opinion. There have been albums I’ve listened to, that I did not like at all on first listen, but then months or years later, after hearing them again, I fell in love with them. Now, I am not saying that a reviewer should listen to an album a hundred times over the course of five years before writing about it. I realize there are deadline considerations to be taken into account. I realize an album you liked or disliked twenty years ago might be one that you simply feel differently about today. But they should really give an album more than just one listen before announcing to the world whether they like it or hate it. Remember, there are many people who base their decision on whether to buy something or not by what a certain reviewer might be telling them. They need to know that this critic’s opinion is something they can trust.
I realize that everyone’s opinions are different and are unique to them, and the reasons why they like an artist might be different than why I like that artist. Just because you are a so-called “music critic” does not mean your opinions are necessarily worth more than the next person. But I do hope that the critic who is writing the review knows something about their subject and has listened to the album enough times to write an informed, detailed review on it. I also hope that they have their facts straight. I read so many reviews of albums where the critic can’t even get the name of the song or album correct, that they are praising or denouncing. How can I trust this critic’s opinion when they can’t even get certain facts correct? Again, this is just lazy journalism, in my opinion. I wonder how many albums people buy or choose not to buy based on some critic’s misinformed opinion.
Another sad state of music journalism is how almost every review nowadays has to be no longer than two paragraphs. How do you properly convey to the public why an album is good or bad in fifty or a hundred words? Everything has to be a quick soundbite these days. Instead of giving a detailed review of ten albums, each magazine would rather write reviews of twenty albums that are so short as to be worthless. They simply tell you nothing of any substance. This has become a disturbing trend over the years. There are some online music webzines that are trying to reverse that trend though, and I think that is a good thing. I want to read a detailed review by someone who is an informed lover of music. Not someone who knows nothing about what they are writing about. It is one thing for someone to write a blog about something they like or dislike. If you are writing for a major magazine though, you need to do your homework before writing an article. Unfortunately, there are too many writers out there nowadays who can’t be bothered. It is a sad reflection of the “soundbite” world we now live in.
Jay Mucci
Art Jackson’s Atrocity – “Gout” (1974)
An unreleased promo from this Miles Davis-associated collective (he bankrolled the project), cut in 1974. I never even heard of this album until I saw it on the blogsite, Never Get Out of the Boat! (link below). This album easily sounds like it could have been recorded at least 10 to 20 years later than it was. Or even right this minute for that matter. Very much ahead of its time. It’s an absolute tragedy this album was never officially released. Someone needs to put it out NOW!
This album is a fucking monster!! One of the great lost fusion albums. Definitely wild stuff – check it out…
This review comes from the Head Heritage / Unsung website, Nov. 9, 2007, written by Joe Kenney…
If, like me, your favorite era of Miles Davis is his electric era, specifically the 1973-1975 years in which Pete Cosey was his guitarist, then you’ve probably wondered why that super-fantastic lineup of his never cut an album together, after Miles decided to retire in late 1975. I mean, they were the greatest group in history, with Pete Cosey’s phenomenal, psychedelic guitar (the man was BEYOND HENDRIX, that’s all there is to it), Reggie Lucas’ wah-wah’d grounding rhythm guitar, Michael Henderson’s dublike basslines…hell, I can’t go through ALL of them, but if you know them, you love them…but if you’ve ever wondered WHAT an album by this super group sans Miles would sound like, well my friends, I give you Gout, by Art Jackson’s Atrocity.
Only thing is, you’ll have to hunt the blogs for it. Recorded in 1974, the album was cut as a promo by Columbia, who then went on to drop both the group AND the album, which is unreleased to this day. “The horror…the horror…” No one’s sure why (info is slim to none on this group and album), but most rumors have to do with Art Jackson’s drug abuse… In any case, the album has perfect sound quality – the only source is the promo LP, of course, and it sounds phenomenal.
The Miles connection surfaces again: Art Jackson was a twenty year-old guitarist whom Miles Davis himself recommended to Columbia records. Apparently Davis even funded the recording of the album. The Atrocity was put together around Jackson, an 11-member collective of hard-rockin’, psychedelia-lovin’, jazz-playin’ motherfuckers (two saxophonists, four drummers, two keyboardists, a guy on reeds, a guy on bass, a guy on “effects”), none of whom I’ve ever heard of (much like Art Jackson himself).
The five long tracks on Gout center around Jackson’s guitar, and the kid is Pete Cosey reborn; the stuff on here sounds almost identical to what Cosey was performing on the Agharta and Pangaea albums. That same sort of fucked-up, psychedelic distortion which goes from raging and chaotic one moment to spaced-out drones the next, the strange tunings, the works. Only thing is, unlike Cosey, Jackson’s not above playing a power chord or three, so the album packs a definite metal-rock punch. I mean, it’s fantastic, the whole thing.
The superbly-named “Shaft In Afghanistan” opens the album. Jackson’s guitar is on super-fucked mode, sounding like a cyclic tone. The rhythm section lays down a menacing, throbbing track, which Jackson and the sax & reeds proceed to riff over. Jackson soon leaves the actual “song” to the others, instead riffing and roaring with all manner of guitar sounds across the track. He’s everywhere, from wah-wah to thick distortion to cosmic fuzz. Things cool down three minutes in, but it’s only a fake-out; the track comes right back in. Jackson funks it up on wah-wah, with studio-tricked handclaps providing additional percussion. There’s all sorts of electronic gimmickry on the album; this isn’t just some quickly recorded demo. This eventually calms down again into a sort of funky ambience – but it’s just another fake-out! The track rips right back up, the drums so superbly recorded (and no doubt closely-miked) that they seem to pound within the caverns of your skull.
“Arabian Fabian” (another great title!) comes in with total menace, until a faux-lite jazz tune pops up. Funky, proto-drum’n’bass drumkit and sax. But this SOON becomes something altogether un-lite. Echoed murk creeps across the track, eerie wails, treated reeds, and dubbed-out sax bleats. Those close-up drums kick in and we’re in an altogether heavier, funkier groove. The first half of the track belongs to the Atrocity, with Jackson throwing in brief fills and licks on his mutated guitar. Things collapse into psychedelic ambience at the five-minute mark; free jazz with plinking guitar and tapped cymbal. But ominous guitar fuzz hovers in the distance, a starving wolf preparing to attack. John Carpenter keyboards arise and give the track even more of a horror-movie feel. But it’s a ruse; the piano takes over, playing a melancholy melody as the other instruments recede into the murk. This doesn’t last. Those ultra-loud drums kick the shit out of you again, jumping out of nowhere, and suddenly we’re into the strangest of strange: ambient free jazz murk with heavy metal drums. The track eventually wears itself out, descending back into the murk from whence it came.
“Available Bush” sounds like some early ‘90s industrial mash, with in-your-face drums and ripping and roaring Ministry-esque guitar. The track throbs on an off-kilter funk grove, Jackson heading the proceedings with the twists and turns of his guitar. The sax plays a faux-Middle Eastern counter-melody to his blasts and blares. The bassist throws in a few snakelike fills of his own, but his instrument sounds anemic compared to Jackson’s acidic distortion. This one humps along for seven minutes which quickly pass by, never establishing anything beyond that off-kilter groove, but never suffering for it.
“Tomato Reign” is the epic of the album, 16+ minutes of cosmic echo and free jazz. It crawls out of the murk in the opening moments, ethereal and disjointed fills from the assembled players. Things continue in this dubbed-out vein for a few minutes; nothing on the level of the Taj Mahal Travelers, but close…along the lines of the last half of Miles’ 1975 shows, when Cosey, et al would let it all hang out in improvisatory bouts of experimental noise and abstraction. Pounding, tribal drums which pop out of the murk and then disappear. Bleated sax fills which float across the sound spectrum. Even animalistic grunts, growls, and screams from the group. This culminates in ultra-fucked guitar from Jackson, sounding again like some cyclic tone from hell, and then someone (a group member? a sample from some obscure film?) states in the calmest tones, “Fuck her. Let her rot.” A few more minutes of banging, echoed drums and bleating, mournful fills from the sax, and that’s it: the freest noise-skronk ever comes to a close.
“Let’s go!” someone yells, and we’re straight into the pounding, pissed-off proto-metal of the title track, “Gout.” This is the rock version of the preceding track, another rhythmless excursion into all things free, only packing a wallop in the guitar distortion and overall menace. It pounds and snarls for six minutes, never finding a groove, preferring to live in its own sonic hellhole of chaotic din. Finally it builds to a climax of sorts, with a few final bashes on the drumkit, and the record’s over.
To be fair, you can see why Columbia refused to release this. Gout is the type of album you’d only find on some free jazz label, or, if it was recorded today, some ultra-hip indie label. But Columbia in the mid-1970s? Releasing this groundless swell of jazz-metal ambience? Hard to believe. But those master tapes are out there, somewhere, as is the full story of what exactly happened to Art Jackson and his Atrocity. In the meantime, we can only listen to their one recorded album, and wonder.
Pink Floyd – “Point Me at the Sky” (Promo – 1968)
Pink Floyd’s 7th UK single from December 1968. This was their first single written by Roger Waters and David Gilmour.
Prince – “Ol’ Skool Company” (TV – 2009)
Taken from March 25, 2009 appearance on The Tonight Show, this comes from his new Mplsound / Lotusflow3r collection.
Prince – “Dreamer” (TV – 2009)
Taken from last night’s appearance on The Tonight Show. This is one of the songs off his upcoming Lotusflow3r 3-cd collection. Very Hendrixesque. Great stuff!!
Pink Floyd – “Jugband Blues” (Promo – 1968)
In our continuing series of Pink Floyd singles, this final Syd Barrett/Pink Floyd single (their 6th one released in the UK) comes from July 1968 – several months after Barrett had already been kicked out of the band. I’m not sure when this promo clip was filmed, but obviously several months prior. This song features the Salvation Army band and is one of Barrett’s more elaborate, not to mention, disorienting compositions.
